


Kastrup Calling

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Infection scare, Leviathans, Radio, Rash sickness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-24
Updated: 2015-09-24
Packaged: 2018-04-23 04:38:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4863479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Late one winter’s night, a radio operator in Oresund hears a desperate message from the Silent World. The Copenhagen Expedition has run into trouble, and one of its members may be infected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kastrup Calling

**Author's Note:**

> I thought that “Iiiincoming radio call!” man (of all people) needed a bit of backstory, so here we go!  
> And, for those not versed in Scandinavian navies, ‘HMS’ as used below refers to Swedish naval vessels (Hans/Hennes Majestäts Skepp), not British ones as the acronym is more commonly known from.

_The Illness: Progression and Identification  
_

_Learning to recognise the earliest symptoms of the Illness can mean the difference between the loss of one and the loss of everyone. All healers are expected to be expertly versed in the stages of infection and capable of identifying the earliest symptoms. Remember: when it comes to the Illness, there is no such thing as too much caution. Report all suspected cases to the relevant authorities immediately.  
_

_Upon exposure or suspected exposure to the pathogen, the patient must be quarantined at the earliest possible opportunity. Infectees present a risk almost from the moment of infection, and it is therefore highly recommended that only immune personnel treat a suspected case from the outset. After being placed under quarantine, attending medical personnel are to keep the patient under close supervision.  
_

_The first symptoms of the Illness are the eponymous rashes, which appear between 4 to 7 days after infection. The location of these rashes is largely random and may not be immediately obvious; therefore you are expected to perform regular inspections of patients. Be aware that some patients may attempt to conceal their rashes from you. Ensure your inspections are thorough.  
_

_Since rashes can be caused by a number of ailments not connected to the Illness, it is recommended to wait for secondary symptoms to develop before making a full diagnosis. These include dizzy spells, loss of appetite, vomiting and sweating, and normally begin 6 to 8 days after infection. Note that these are also symptoms of stress, and are to some extent to be expected in someone who believes they may have the Illness. Take care to ensure your diagnosis is accurate.  
_

_Tertiary symptoms of the Illness, which include skin lesions, pustules, necrosis and preliminary mutations, should not be allowed to develop unless the circumstances are exceptional or a diagnosis cannot be accurately made without them. Following confirmation of these symptoms, the attending medical personnel are expected to euthanize the patient as quickly as possible. Note that the method chosen for this should be one which minimises the infection risk to others – consequently, methods such as lethal injection or asphyxiation are recommended over ‘messier’ methods such as guns, knives or blunt force trauma.  
_

_\- Excerpt from_ The Healer’s Handbook _, 8 th edition, Royal Danish Army, Yr 79 _

* * *

 

_Oresund Base, Yr 90  
_

They had forecasted a cold snap, and for once they had actually gotten it right. For a week now the mercury had barely risen above zero and snow flurries had danced in the air. Treacherous pools of ice covered the metal floors of the Oresund base and icicles hung merrily from handrails and derricks.

All of this was good news for radioman 3rd-class Harald Jensen, who at 72 years of age was always on the lookout for something new he could cheerfully complain about. The cold made his old wound ache, he loudly declared to anyone who would listen. He could always tell when it was going to freeze because the bone in his leg would hurt where it had never quite set properly.

He claimed, usually after one too many beers, that he had gotten the wound during a battle with a leviathan during the campaigns in the autumn of 55. His ship, the _KDM Holger_ , had sailed as part of a flotilla to destroy the pods that infested the waters around the Faroe Islands. There had been fifteen ships when the first leviathans surfaced and attacked the fleet at sundown, and there were nine left once the last leviathan bled its last into the cold waters. Harald had been walking wounded, he would say, having suffered a nasty break in his leg during the battle. Quite how a radio operator managed to break his leg during a sea battle, his drinking buddies were always polite enough not to ask.

In actual fact, Harald Jensen had not broken his leg during the Battle of Streymoy – although he had indeed been there, contrary to what his more uncharitable friends would insinuate behind his back. Instead, he had broken it falling off an ice-slick gangplank in the winter of 57 as he went ashore in Rønne for some leave.

He sighed and sat back in his chair, rubbing his thigh absently in an attempt to soothe the ache that pulsed through it. The sun had dropped below the horizon about half an hour ago now, and he knew he ought to pack up soon. The small shack that the civilian radio traffic was operated from wasn’t heated, and it became an icebox in the winter. He shivered and pulled his thin jacket around him. It wasn’t good to stay out in the cold at his age, and he knew it. Technically, he shouldn’t even still have been in the radio room at this late hour.

These days, the radio chatter tended to fade with the sun. It was common wisdom – true or not – that infected creatures were somehow drawn to radio transmissions. No-one wanted to be advertising their location to the things that ruled the nights of this new world. Ships would sign off, control rooms went dark, trains said their goodbyes. Every night humanity wished itself goodnight, and prayed it would see the dawn.

But Harald always insisted on staying behind to wish the ships he’d been in contact with throughout the day a safe voyage as they slipped out of range. He was old-fashioned like that.

But now the last of the day’s ferries, trawlers and tramp steamers had vanished over the horizon and no more were coming in. So he got to his feet, slowly, and made to put his headset down when he glanced at the console in front of him and saw there was one radio channel still open.

 _103.8. That’s Kastrup,_ he thought to himself. _What are they doing broadcasting this late?_

With a frown he sat back down and flicked the radio equipment to the frequency assigned to the expedition he had spent the past few weeks taking status reports from. He wasn’t sure what he expected to hear, but what he heard certainly was unexpected.

It sounded almost like a prayer.

 

* * *

 

“Please, please let it be nothing. Don’t let him find anything tomorrow. _Please._ ” The last word was almost a sob.

“Kastrup? Kastrup, this is Oresund. Is everything alright over there?”

A short yelp of surprise. “Agh! What!? Who’s there?” And then repeated in Swedish, because the speaker doubted the man understood her native Finnish.

“Kastrup, this is Oresund. I’m picking up your radio traffic. I repeat, is everything alright?”

“Um…, yes. Yes, everything’s fine over here. Was I broadcasting?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Oh… oh _no_ , I must have hit the buttons by accident. I’m sorry, Oresund. Please ignore anything I sent. Kastrup, over and-”

“What’s wrong?” _  
_

“Say again, Oresund?”

“Oh, come on, you don’t need to use the official language at this hour. What’s up, Kastrup?” _  
_

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t sound like nothing.”

There was silence on the air for a while – or at least, an absence of human voices.

Harald decided to try a different tactic. “I’m radioman 3rd-class Harald Jensen. I don’t think we’ve been introduced, although I’ve been filing your reports for a few weeks now.” _  
_

The air was dead for so long that he thought that whoever was on the other end must have left, and was about to turn his radio off, when the silence was broken by what was barely a whisper:

“Tuuri Hotakainen. Ummm… skald, I guess. And mechanic. And translator. Diver, too.”

“And radiowoman, don’t forget that.” _  
_

A snort of what might be laughter. “I guess.” _  
_

“Well, I can certainly see why they brought you along. Do your teammates do any work, or do they have you do everything?”

Genuine laughter this time. Harald smiled.

“Blow things up and burn things down, mostly. I just sort of keep everything running as best I can.”

“I’m sure that’s modesty talking. I’ve seen your reports, remember. Their only driver, their only mechanic – why, without you, I imagine your little expedition would fall apart!”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

There was something ominous in those words. “What do you mean?” _  
_

A ragged exhalation, tired and frightened. “I… I think I may have the Illness, Mr Jensen.”

Now it was the old man’s turn to fall silent. “Are you certain, Ms Hotakainen?” he asked at long last.

“No. Not certain. Not yet.”

_“What happened?”_

 

* * *

 

Her luck had run out.

In her defence, it had not been for want of precautions. You could level lots of accusations at Sigrun, most of which she would cheerfully accept, but the woman certainly knew how to pick good camp sites. Excellent defensible locations, clear lines of sight, and the captain had even set up a patrol roster after Emil and Lalli had run afoul of an infected dog at their previous site. Had a troll or a beast wandered into the camp, it would have been made short work of. Even a giant would have had a story to tell its friends about afterwards, Tuuri thought with a dismal little smile.

But there was always some things you couldn’t plan for, and this had been one of them. It had been daylight, and perhaps that had made them all complacent, sat around the stove and complaining about Mikkel’s stodgy porridge. Tuuri had pottered over to the tank to get a cloth Emil could use to wipe off the porridge he’d spilled all over his uniform _again_ , and was a few paces away from the rest of them. The first inkling of anything about to go wrong was Lalli suddenly sitting bolt upright with a frown on his face. Tuuri looked over in confusion and was about to shout across to ask him what was wrong. Then Sigrun had gotten to her feet, looking around warily, then Emil and Mikkel and even Reynir, and she had become aware of a faint slithering rumble coming from the ground beneath her.

And then the earth below their feet caved in and burst outward in a swarm of snapping teeth and scrabbling ribs and awful, unblinking eyes.

She didn’t know the Scandinavian term, but in Finnish they were called menninkäinen.

Infected moles.

They scuttled and crawled out of the burrow they had dug, shrieking in pain and confusion as the bright winter sun blinded and cleansed them. Sigrun had been the first to recover from the surprise, knocking the stove over into their path and crushing the first few underfoot. But more replaced those she killed, driven on by the pathogen in their blood and on their breath. One had split off from the group – by accident or by design, Tuuri would never know – and scampered lightning-fast across the snow and soil towards her. It had gotten to her just as she had been able to jam her haz-mask over her mouth.

That had been seven days ago now. Mikkel said that if she wasn’t showing symptoms by eight days, she would be fine.

 

* * *

 

Harald listened to Tuuri’s story and a shiver that had nothing to do with the plummeting temperature ran up his spine. He was immune, thank the gods he did not believe in, and had never had to worry about being infected. He could barely begin to imagine what the woman on the other end of the radio connection must be going through.

He groped for anything comforting to say. “Well… seven days is almost long enough?” he offered at last, after an uncomfortably long silence. “Surely you can’t be infected if it’s been a week?”

Tuuri’s gulp was audible even over the fizz and crackle of the radio. “I… I overheard Mikkel and Sigrun… that’s our healer and our captain, by the way…”

Harald didn’t bother to tell her that he knew who the members of the expedition were. He’d received so many of their reports he felt like the five – no, six – people out there were almost co-workers.

“…I overheard Mikkel telling Sigrun about slow burn cases.”

“Slow burn?”

“It’s what the healers call it. Sometimes the Illness… doesn’t appear until the last second. So we don’t know. Not until tomorrow. Mikkel said he’s never heard of a single case lasting longer than eight days without signs, so…” Tuuri trailed off, her voice cracking slightly.

“I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Harald said. He didn’t think he’d ever sounded more unconvincing in his entire life.

Static was starting to fringe the edges of the audio transmissions, the song of the Silent World, but it couldn’t drown out Tuuri’s ragged breath. It wheezed through her haz-mask, the filters working to keep potential infection vectors _in_ rather than out for the first time in their history.

There was an itch on the back of her neck that she had not told Mikkel about. After all, it could just be nothing… She briefly considered telling this man, this complete stranger, but decided against it. What good would it do?

“Yeah,” she whispered dismally. “Maybe.”

“I take it they’ve quarantined you?” Harald asked, at a loss for anything to say. This was against all protocol, he knew that. When you found infected people on the airwaves, you were supposed to just ignore them. It was a hangover rule from the first years, when there had been so many screams for help over the radios, from collapsing safezones and crumbling battalions and frightened civilian enclaves, that radio operators were the most likely of all professions to commit suicide. If you couldn’t help someone, tune out. Don’t dwell. There’s nothing you can do, so don’t waste time trying.

Like the other rule about signing off after sundown, Harald ignored it.

Tuuri snorted with humourless laughter. “No, they haven’t quarantined me. They’ve quarantined Reynir instead.”

“What?”

“He’s the only one apart from me who isn’t immune. And it’s like Sigrun said: who’s more use, the mechanic or the sheep herder? So we’ve stuck him in a tent outside with Mikkel, and I’m with the rest of the crew in the tank. Still helping out.” She buried her head in her hands. “Like we’re all pretending nothing’s wrong.”

There was no mistaking the sob this time. Harald sat awkwardly, as impotent ten miles away as he would have been sat right next to her, and wracked his brains trying to think of something to say.

Inspiration came in a flash. He remembered when he was a boy, not even thirty years after the fall of the old world, how his parents would tell him stories to keep the night terrors at bay. Perhaps something similar would work now…

“Um, Mr Jensen? Can I ask you something?”

“Hm? Oh, of course.”

“If I don’t make it-”

“Don’t say that.”

“If I don’t make it,” Tuuri carried on, as if he hadn’t spoken, the effort to keep her voice steady obvious, “could you get ahold of a man called Onni Hotakainen please? He’s my brother, he works in the Keuruu base back in Finland. Please, just tell him… tell him I should have listened to him.”

“…Is that all?”

“He’ll know the rest.”

Harald burned the name into his memory. “Onni Hotakainen. I’ll remember.”

“Thank you.”

Another awkward silence. She was probably expecting him to kill the line soon, Harald realised. To blithely wish her luck, click the radio off, stand up and walk out of the freezing radio room and out of her life. _The hell with that_ , he thought bitterly. If his choice was between staying with her or leaving, only a callous person would call that a choice at all. He wrapped his jacket tighter around himself and clenched his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering. If he could take her mind off of things, even for just a few moments, he must.

“Have you ever heard of the Battle of Streymoy?” he asked.

“Huh?” Tuuri asked, caught completely off guard by the sudden swerve in the conversation. “No…”

And so he told her, over the next few hours, as heavy clouds billowed overhead and flurries of snow fell through the sky like the stars were coming down to earth. He told her how the sunset had been a brilliant fiery red that dusk as the flotilla swept out of the harbour of Byrknes. Sleek Norwegian clippers dancing across the waves under banks of sails, hulking Swedish dreadnoughts whose steel skins were as grey as the water, ancient Danish cruisers from the old world belching soot from their chimneys as their engines gasped and choked on fuels they were never meant to feed on. Twelve ships, the closest to an armarda the new world could muster, rallying out into the night to clear the shipping lanes.

They linked up with three Icelandic vessels in the waters to the north of the Faroes, and went hunting.

He told her of the tense silence as the flotilla scoured the seas, searching for the leviathan pods that had been harassing and sinking ships all throughout the year of 55 – why so many had swarmed the North Sea that year, or why they had congregated around the Faroes, no-one knew – and the sudden panic as the sonar screens started their ping-ping-ping as something moved towards them from below. He recounted the whoosh- _crash_ of the first depth charges being flung, the garbled chatter over the radios as fifteen ships desperately tried to co-ordinate and not to sink one another. The awful groans and roars as the first leviathans breached the surface, erupting upwards in sprays of water and foam. He told her how he watched from the porthole as one flung itself up, almost clear out of the water, crashed back down onto a small Norwegian ship – the _KNM Amudsen_ , he thought, although he never knew for certain – and smashed it clean in two. He told her how another leviathan, bursting out of its own skin, had grabbed his own ship with pincers that had once been flippers and jaws that split into three. How he had been flung against the radio gear and felt the wet _snap_ in his leg as the bone gave way.

A little white lie, that last one, but from Tuuri’s horrified gasp he felt it was an acceptable one. He offered to stop telling the story if it might upset her, only for her to demand he finish it. This was what she had wanted to hear when she signed on for the expedition, she explained – stories of the world outside the dismal walls of Keuruu.

So he carried on, telling how the battle had slowly turned in favour of the ships. How leviathans had been chopped up and diced on the drill bits and saw blades that festooned the undersides of the Swedish and Danish ships, how they’d been blown in half by depth charges and gored by Norwegian harpoon guns. How the crew of the _HMS Vasa_ had rammed two of the monsters with their dreadnought’s razor-sharp battering ram even as water poured through gashes in her hull and sent her to the bottom.

He considered telling her that some of the crew on his ship had seen an odd green glow on the horizon and demanded that they retreat at once – screaming some nonsense about a kraken – but didn’t.

When dawn finally came, nine ships remained and of those only six were seaworthy. But the battle had been won. What leviathans had not been butchered slunk away. The Battle of Stremoy was over, and the North Sea could be sailed again.

His story of how they came home to a hero’s welcome became the story of the rest of his life as he carried on into the night. Midnight came and went and neither of them noticed. They swapped tales of their lives. Harald told Tuuri how he had married twice, divorced once and buried another. She told him of life in Keuruu, and of Saimaa before that. He asked her what she wanted to do when she came back from the expedition – and she answered, her fears and that ominous itch on her neck for one precious second completely forgotten.

It was gone four in the morning when Tuuri, still trying to hold up her end of the conversation, felt her eyelids grow intolerably heavy and slumped across the radio panel. She barely said farewell to the man who had stayed with her for what could have been her last night on earth.

 

* * *

 

To the north, what felt like a world away, radioman 3rd-class Harald Jensen listened to the soft snores through his headset and smiled to himself.

_You sleep, friend, and I promise you things will look brighter in the morning. They always do.  
_

It was very, very cold.

He wasn’t shivering, he noticed with a sort of detached interest. Odd.

From outside, he heard the creak of metal settling under the weight of a heavy snowfall. Hadn’t they said that tonight would be a cold one? And here he was, sat in an unheated room with barely a warm garment to his name! Silly old man.

But he didn’t _feel_ cold.

He supposed that some part of him knew what was happening to him. The rest of him either didn’t know, or was past caring. So be it.

There was a flash of light through the window. Floodlights roving and searching, peering out into the waters of the straits for leviathans and draug. Soldiers stood next to them, huddled deep in furs and insulating fabrics, machine guns and flares at the ready.

He should go. He should go and warm up. But he suddenly felt exhausted, and what was the point in tramping round the base when he felt as dog-tired as this? He’d probably end up slipping on some ice and cracking his skull. No, what he should do was get some rest. A quick nap. And besides, what if Tuuri came back on the air? It wouldn’t do for her to be greeted with nothing but dead static now, would it?

Just a quick nap, and then things would look brighter. They always did.

Harald Jensen smiled and closed his eyes.

 

* * *

 

_The next day  
_

“Kastrup to Oresund, come in Oresund. Mr Jensen? Mr Jensen, are you receiving me?”

_“This is Oresund. Receiving you loud and clear.”_

“Mr Jensen, its Tuuri! I’m fine! I don’t have the… wait, who is this please?”

_“Radioman 1 st-class Clausen, Royal Danish Navy, Oresund Base. Why? Who is this?”_

“Oh! Um. Ah, could you patch me thorough to Mr Jensen please? That’s Harald Jensen, he’s a radio operator too, and-”

_“Yeah, I know him. Knew him. Listen, if you want to talk to the old guy you’re going to need a mage, friend.”_

“Well, my cousin… I’m sorry, Oresund, could you say that again?”

_“Jensen’s dead. Shuffled off last night.”_

A very, very long silence.

 _“Kastrup? Kastrup, do you copy? Kastrup,_ are you there? _”_

“Yes… yes, I copy. How… how did…”

_“Stupid old fool stayed out in the civilian radio room all night. Probably fell asleep or something. Got cold last night, we found him practically frozen into his chair this morning.”_

Very quiet, almost lost in the background static: “No… but… I was…”

_“Say again, Kastrup, I didn’t copy.”_

Another pause, shorter.

“Kastrup out.”

_“Ah… okay. Copy that. Oresund, over and out.”_

* * *

 

_Bornholm, Yr 91  
_

It was a beautiful autumn day, crisp and clear. There wouldn’t be many more like it, not with winter on its way.

Freja Lund, groundskeeper of a small military cemetery on the outskirts of Rønne, stood at a respectful distance and watched as the strange woman bent down to read a small bronze plaque mounted on a short brick wall. Space was at a premium on the cramped Danish island, so all burials these days were cremations. Danish cemeteries were rows upon rows of these waist-high brick walls, plaques crowding their surface, small pots underneath for any flowers relatives wished to leave.

The woman, who Freja pegged at about twenty but whose expression spoke of having lived almost twice that number of years, had arrived about half an hour ago. From her accent, Freja guessed she was Finnish, although she spoke Danish almost flawlessly – but with odd stresses on the words here and there, as if perhaps Swedish was the language she was more comfortable with. Her hair was strange, too. Silvery-grey, despite her youthful looks. Definitely Finnish, Freja decided. She’d heard they all had a touch of magic to them, and perhaps this odd hair was a sign of that.

She watched as the woman – who had asked to be shown the final resting place of a one Harald Jensen – reached down to the plaque and muttered a few words. Freja was half expecting some magic spell, maybe even the dead man suddenly bursting back to life from his ashes, but nothing came of it. The woman straightened up and looked around with a rather hollow expression.

“Were you close?” Freja asked, as the woman stepped back from the wall and they began to walk back towards the cemetery’s wrought-iron gates.

“Not really,” the woman said distantly. “But… he was there. During a difficult time.”

Freja had experience dealing with this sort of thing. She did not ask.

It was only once the woman had left, shaking Freja’s hand in an oddly formal way, and she had gone back inside her little cottage that adjoined the graveyard that Freja suddenly realised who the woman was. She didn’t know why it had taken her so long – her picture had been in the papers for weeks! She grabbed a scrap of paper and a pen, hoping that she might be able to get the woman’s autograph for her nephew.

But by the time she had stumbled back out of the door, Tuuri Hotakainen was gone.


End file.
